Last saturday, I spoke with my colleague Edwin van der Kraan at the German Delphi Tage 2009: one of the (or maybe just “the”) largest Delphi user groups events in Europe.

The session was titled “Delphi power user: speed up your Delphi work”.

Since we both speak German, the session was in German, and the slides in the download are mostly German too.

Rougly half of the session was done by demo’s and a few slides.
The rest was discussing with the public in what way they sped up their Delphi work, or what portions of their Delphi work they would like to speed up.

The room was packed with people form start to finish, and we had a lot of fun. Though the public learned a lot, even we had a few “aha” moments ourselves.

Some topics we covered were these:

Jeroen Pluimers [wahrscheinlich englischsprachig]

A lot of people use components to make their work easier. There are also tools and IDE enhancements that you can use to speed up your Delphi work. This session shows you how. We will cover new things introduced since Delphi 7 and two tools that make you really productive: Gexperts and ModelMaker CodeExplorer. The goal of this session is not to show you the vast possibilities, but to concentrate on things that you profit from most.

Some of these:

how do I write code faster

how do I write less code

which refactorings are really smart

how can I best change existing code

which changes always succeed, which ones fail and how can I adjust to these failures

how can I change the Tab Order of controls fast and accurately

what kind of breakpoint tricks are handy

how do I replace components

smart things with the Tool Palette

smart placement of your Windows

how do I find things in my project groups and on disk

how do I find my way in code that others wrote

This is not the final list, as this session has plenty of time for questions from the public. In addition, there will be room to discuss other tools. So: if there are things you do often and cost a lot of time: this is your chance to speak up!

The most usefull refactorings introduced since Delphi 7

Fun with the tool palette in non designer windows

Everything in Delphi is text based, including components copied to the clipboard